


Pseudonym

by ebbj9891



Series: In Quest Of Something [77]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, POV Gus (Queer as Folk), Parent-Child Relationship, Past Child Abuse, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-19 20:35:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3623409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebbj9891/pseuds/ebbj9891
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's time to take the name back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pseudonym

Let me get one thing straight: I’m not the asshole that everyone thinks I am.

I didn’t mean to upset people. Really, I didn’t. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. 

It was simply unavoidable. An unfortunate inevitability, if you will. I tried to find ways around it, but it is what it is. Certain people were always going to be hurt.

I wish it hadn’t been that way. It’s not like I  _wanted_ to hurt them. I’m not a sadist, okay? I’m also not a bad person or a devil child or any of the other things that people might believe me to be. 

I swear, this whole pseudonym scandal has nothing to do with me trying to be cruel or wanting to hurt anyone.

It was about something else – something way more important than everyone’s hurt feelings.

*

“Gus Kinney,” Mom says, repeating the name that’s printed atop my latest manuscript. Shit, I wish I’d waited to show it to them. The copy that I've brought along to Toronto is a redraft of a redraft of a redraft; a tired old bundle of papers that’s bleeding green ink (I hate working with red, always have). There isn’t a single tidy edge or corner in that stack – they’re all folded or torn, so basically the damn thing looks like hell. Fuck, why did I show it to them now? Why didn’t I wait? In a few weeks, the actual proper copies will go to print. I could have saved myself the embarrassment.

I could have saved myself in general. Man, I  _really_ should have waited. This isn’t going over well at all. Mom is staring at me, blanching, as she repeats it again: “Gus Kinney.”

Then she looks at Melanie with an expression of panic. Melanie grabs the embarrassingly shabby manuscript and peers at it. Shit, Melanie’s going to kill me. I can see it in her eyes.

So this is it. This is how I die.

“Why do you need a pseudonym?” J.R. demands as she stares flaming crossbows at me. Maybe I won’t meet my end at Melanie’s hands. Maybe my little sister will do the dastardly deed. I watch her lip curl as she asks disdainfully, “What’s wrong with your _actual_  name?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my ‘actual’ name,” I say, shrugging. “It’s just not the name I want to publish under.”

This doesn’t do anything to appease my little sister. She continues scowling at me. I ignore it as best I can, but J.R. is as stubborn as the day is long. She’s not going to wipe that nasty look off her face – not unless I grab the shambles that is my manuscript and scrub _Gus Kinney_ off the cover.

And off every footer in the document. Fuck, I’d almost forgotten about those, but now Melanie’s flicking through it and staring at each and every one in shock. It must be like getting bullets pumped into you by a machine gun, all rapid-fire like: _GusKinneyGusKinneyGusKinneyGusKinneyGusKinneyGusKinney._ Four-hundred pages of them, one after the other. Ouch.

“It’s so not your name,” J.R. mutters with a stern shake of her head. Jeez, she makes a better eighty-year-old than a twenty-year-old.

“Honey, it’s Gus’ choice,” Mom says, her voice quavering a little. Her gaze is bouncing back and forth frantically between the manuscript and Melanie. “Uh, right, Mel?”

Wrong. So wrong. Melanie’s going to _freak._ She’s going to kill me. Hell hath no fury like Melanie when she’s been scorned.

“Gus Kinney,” Melanie says, frowning. I brace myself for whatever’s going to come next. Her brow knits together in a tight scowl, then suddenly, she assumes a calmer expression. “I guess it’s up to you, kiddo. We’re proud of you no matter what.”

 _Kiddo. Sonny Boy. Gussy._ I thought maybe I’d be rid of those names by now, but they didn’t disappear when I turned eighteen, or twenty-one, or even twenty-four. They’ll probably follow me into my thirties, forties, fifties... goddamnit, they’ll probably be with me for all of eternity. 

“It’s kind of rude,” J.R. snarks. Still scowling up a storm, she huffs, “You know that’s  _not_  your name, right?”

“I know it’s the name that I want on my book,” I bite back. “And that’s all that matters.”

J.R. looks to our moms with an indignant expression. It’s like she’s expecting them to put a stop to it. That may have worked once upon a time, but not anymore. I’m twenty-fucking-four! It’s time that I made my own mind up about shit like this.

Melanie sets down the manuscript and pushes it across the table to me. She doesn’t look at me, which isn’t a great sign. I’m guessing she’s pretty cut up about this. Shit.

Mom, on the other hand, seems to have brightened.

“Gus Kinney,” she says again, smiling to herself. “It has a nice ring to it.”

I grin at her. “I thought so, too.”

*

It  _does_ have a nice ring to it. It’s a hell of a lot simpler than ‘Gus Peterson-Marcus’, which is kind of a mouthful. ‘Gus Kinney’ is sharp. It’s to-the-point. It sounds swift and smooth.

I fucking love it. If that makes me an asshole, so be it.

After my fateful meeting with moms and J.R., word spread pretty quickly. I managed to control it just soon enough – I didn’t want it reaching dads before I did. But when I made a stop in Pittsburgh before going home to New York, word had reached the family. And boy, did they let me have it.

My sins, as they have been emphatically outlined to me, are as follows:

  1.        I’m not thinking about how much I must be hurting my moms
  2.        I’m potentially creating divisions within the family
  3.        I’m not showing due sensitivity to the people who raised me
  4.        I’m not thinking about my actions and allowing myself to come across as selfish and ungrateful



Let me be clear about one more thing: each and every one of those so-called ‘sins’ is _fucking **bullshit.**_

I’m not even going to bother running through the reasons as to _why_ they're bullshit. There's honestly no point. It didn’t get me anywhere in Pittsburgh. Nobody wanted to listen to my side of things. All that mattered to them was that I’d ditched the Peterson-Marcus label in favour of Kinney. They’d already made up their minds: moms and J.R. were hurt, I was the cause of that hurt. And so I was granted the illustrious title of ‘asshole’. I mean, nobody actually said it, but I'm guessing that’s what they’re all thinking.

You know what, though? I think that people _expect_ me to be an asshole. I think that they’ve expected it since the day I was born. Hell, maybe it predates that. Maybe they started expecting it from the moment that Dad agreed to help Mom get pregnant. Yeah, I bet it started then and they’ve been set on it ever since.

I’ll tell you what – I am sick of everyone thinking that I’m a carbon copy of Dad. Yes, we look alike. Yeah, we think alike. Okay, sometimes we even act alike. But **no** , we’re not the same person. It’s not even fair that everyone tries to lump us both into the category of ‘asshole’! I mean, yeah, Dad has his rough edges and he can come across a certain way… but he’s not a bad guy. He’s actually the best guy I know (well, him and Jus). So it’s really fucking offensive that everyone seems convinced that he’s an asshole and I’m biologically bound to be one as well.

What's worse is that it doesn’t stop there.

Everyone expected me to go into advertising. Everyone expected me to be a fag. Everyone expected me to be some slutty, non-conventional, revered and renowned sex god.

God.  _Damnit._

To be fair, they’ve let go of the first two. It’s pretty clear to everyone now that I’ve made my own mind up about my career path and my sexuality. But the last one? No such luck. Everyone is still hellbent on pigeon-holing me into that role. If I had a dollar for every inappropriate question or comment that I’ve been forced to field, I’d have enough money to go into hiding permanently. God, that sounds tempting. Then I wouldn’t ever have to deal with everyone’s pushing and prodding ever again. Like, if they want to hear gross stories from an arrogant over-sharer, they should talk to Dad. He has absolutely no problem running his mouth about him and Jus. _Ugh._ Me? Nope, no way. I don’t want to talk about my partners. I don’t want to get asked about my sexual proclivities. I’d much rather be left alone.

Assuming the pseudonym ‘Gus Kinney’ probably isn’t going to help with that. It’s probably going to reinforce the long-held family mythology that I’m Dad’s demonic duplicate.

But this is bigger than that. I can risk reinforcing idiotic assumptions.

It’s also not really about how the name sounds. Yeah, ‘Gus Kinney’ sounds nice. But there are more important issues to consider.

More than anything else, this is about what the name _means._  

*

At first, I thought about assuming a whole new name to write under. I have a whole list of them somewhere: names that Ruby and I fancied up for ourselves when we were, like, nine years old. For some reason, I was obsessed with the name Steven.  _Jacob Stevens. Steven Marcus. Liam Stevens Jnr._  And so the list goes on, and on, and on. I can’t even remember why Ruby and I were so fixated on the idea of a new name. Maybe it was during one of our frequent spells of plotting to run away from home. Maybe it was something else.

I spent a hell of a lot of time looking at that list of names, and even longer fashioning up a new list. None of them ever fit quite right. I continued my search nonetheless: I searched through all of my books and old journals, thinking that I might happen upon something that would suit me. I must have spent days looking. Then, finally, I found it; not a name, but an answer - an entry in my journal from the week after Molly and Noah's wedding.

* * *

_Journal Entry 871_

_Dad and I talked some more today. He took me out to lunch, just the two of us, and told me that I could ask him anything. I didn’t even know where to start - the questions I’ve accrued since last weekend seem endless. I’d be willing to bet a fuckload of money that 95% of them are totally unaskable, if not unanswerable. Or maybe it’s that I don’t want to hear the answer. I don’t know. I can’t get my head around all of this shit._

_I asked Dad how much Justin knows about our family and he said ‘a lot of it’. When I asked why not all, he kind of went quiet and then told me that ‘these things take time’. I don’t get it. They’ve been together for sixteen years, isn’t that time enough? Like, put me to sleep and wake me up when those two start making sense to me. I just don’t get them._

_I also asked him about whether he thinks his mom or sister would want to know me. He told me ‘no’, point blank. Ouch. Fucking ouch. I mean, it’s not like I want to know them. I just wonder what they’d think of me. Not much, I’m guessing. _

_Then I asked him whether he ever thought about changing his name. Like, why is he even walking around with this big fat indicator that he’s related to those sickos? If I were him, I would have changed it the second I turned eighteen. Or at least when he got married! Only when I asked him and Jus about that once, they looked at me like I was crazy or something. Then they started laughing and Jus was all like, “Can you even imagine?” Like it was totally out of the question. No Brian Taylor or Brian Kinney-Taylor or Justin Taylor-Kinney or whatever with those two, apparently._

_But anyway. Dad said he thought about it when he was a kid, but not so much as he got older. I pointed out that it’s their name and so why would he want to keep it, and he got all defensive and said that it’s his name too, and there’s no undoing that. _

_‘Besides,’ he said, ‘You always liked the name. You used to write it on all your schoolbooks and shit. Don’t let them take that from you.’_

_I won’t. They’ve already taken enough as it is._

* * *

It was then that I decided. I wasn’t going to publish as Gus Peterson-Marcus or Gus Stevens or Steven Marcus or whatever. I briefly toyed with the idea of Gus Kinney-Taylor, if only to see the looks on dads’ faces, but ultimately I decided to keep it simple: Gus Kinney.

Sharp, to-the-point, swift, and smooth. And  _ours._ Mine and Dad’s. 

That's what matters the most. Like hell is anybody going to take it away from us.

*

“Gus Kinney,” Jus says, beaming at me. I swear he’s about to tear up. “Gussy, that’s so sweet.”

I’m conflicted. On the one hand, this is a really nice change of pace – no scowling, no freaking out, no mind-numbingly invalid accusations. On the other hand, Jus is apparently trying to embarrass the hell out of me. Does he not realise that we’re in public? That we come to this restaurant at least once a month? He can’t go tearing up in here and calling me ‘Gussy’ and saying how ‘sweet’ I am. This will not do. I cannot be made to look like an overgrown toddler - not here, not now, not anywhere, not ever.

“It’s not about sweet,” I mutter, staring sternly at him. Despite my best efforts, I can feel my cheeks going splotchy. “It’s about something else.”

“Something else, huh?” Jus smiles at me knowingly. “Well, whatever your motive may be, I think it’s perfect.”

He turns my book over and over in his hands, then swallows hard. After breathing in and out carefully, Jus passes the book back to me and requests, “Sign it for me?”

Now my face is really burning. I grab a pen from my satchel and open the book. It won’t hit the shelves for ages yet, but when I got back to New York last week I managed to swipe a few copies early for the family. Proper copies – no more torn edges or ink blotches. This is the real deal. In Jus’ copy, I sign my name - or, rather, my pseudonym:  _Gus Kinney._ It feels right, putting pen to paper like that.  _Gus Kinney_ seems to fit me like a glove.

At least, I think so. I have to wonder: how will Dad react?

I need to make sure that I get to him before anyone else does.

“I haven’t told Dad yet.” I frown at Jus and warn, “So don’t you dare go and run your big fat mouth about it.”

“My ‘big fat mouth’, huh?” Justin grins and shakes his head at me. “You’re an insufferable little brat, you know that?”

Grinning back at him, I retort, “Wonder where I get that from.”

*

So with everyone else down, there’s just Dad left to tell. I know that Jus won't be able to keep his big fat mouth shut for long, so I'd better get it over with quick. Even if Jus does manage to zip his lips, there are other risks. Despite my best efforts to smooth things over, the family is still feeling pretty raw. Moms are still slightly shocked and hurt about the whole thing. J.R.’s still sulking. People back in Pittsburgh are still pissed on account of my many ‘sins’. Out of all of those people, someone is bound to spill sooner or later. Yeah, better to bite the bullet and get it over with. I want Dad to hear this from me, not from anyone else.

Maybe I ought to have told him first. I don’t know. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference. 

I guess, ultimately, I just want him to know how much I appreciate his support. It doesn’t matter all that much whether he finds out now, or whether he could have found out a few weeks back. It just matters that he knows.

That’s another reason for taking his name. It’s not just about reclaiming it from our disturbed relatives; it’s about honouring what Dad has done for me.

As I hop into the elevator and wait for it to ascend to Kinnetik’s offices on the top floor, I think about the book that’s hidden in my bag and how Dad helped bring it to life. 

When I was nine and visiting New York for the summer, I saw a leather-bound journal in a bookshop and fell in love with it. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be antique and insanely expensive. Jus and Dad had to peel me away from the glass cabinet. They were insistent that I couldn’t have it, so as soon as they hauled me out of the store I focused on forgetting the journal. _Too late,_ I told myself (even though my nine-year-old self was crushed), _And way too expensive. Forget about it._

A few months later, for my tenth birthday, Dad gave me the journal. Everyone told him off for spending too much money but he didn't seem to care. I didn't either. I told Dad that it was the best gift ever and I used it to write my first proper story.

When I was eleven, I finished writing that story. I filled the entire journal from one aged cover to the other. I gave it to Dad for Christmas. By New Year’s Eve, he’d finished it. When he gave it back, he hugged me and told me it was incredible. Later, I found a note inside: _Keep going._ I took those words to heart.

It hasn’t always been easy. I got knocked back by three agents before I found one who wanted anything to do with me. My first draft got annihilated. So did the second, third, fourth, fifth… thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. _‘Keep going’_ sure sounds nice, but it’s hard to stick with it when publishers keep beating you to a limp, lifeless pulp.

When my sixteenth draft got knocked back, I spent a weekend in my apartment crying. Dad showed up on the Sunday unannounced – he needed help with Jus’ birthday present or something – and saw that I’d been crying. He didn’t force me to talk. He let me keep my secret to myself and just held me while I sobbed for a while. Then he told me to pick myself up and keep going. Literally, he said those words: “Keep going.” I mean, what are the chances? There’s no way he would have remembered the inscription in my journal. It was pure coincidence. But those words bolstered me. I kept going.

My seventeenth draft caught the attention of a smaller local publisher. It wasn’t quite what I had envisaged when I first planned on moving to New York and pursuing writing, but it was something. It was real. They wanted me. As soon as I realised that, I wanted them right back - more than I’ve ever wanted anything. We’ve been working on it together for almost two years now. Finally, it looks less like a useless array of words and more like an actual book.

I guess that’s what it is now: an actual book. Dad’s copy is in my hands right now. As I walk into Kinnetik, I glance down at it and gulp.

I thought facing up to moms was scary. This is downright _terrifying._

I find Dad in the conference room, perusing portfolios that are spread out across the table in a glossy continuum. I knock on the door to grab his attention. He smiles at me. 

“Sonny Boy - what brings you to these parts?”

“Not that nickname,” I mutter, but Dad remains unfazed. The nickname will stick, just like all the others - this I know. I close the door behind me and lock it. “Do you have a minute?”

“For you? I have a lot longer.”

“Thanks.” I smile and sit down across from him. “Have you spoken to Jus today?”

“No, why?”

“No reason.” I peer at him and try to suss out if he’s heard from anyone else. I don’t think he has. That’s something. “So, I picked up some books from the publisher last week. They’re all ready to go for the release.”

Dad’s entire face lights up. Grinning, he enthuses, “Let me see.”

I hand the book over with the cover facing down. Dad takes it from me eagerly and turns it over. My heart starts leaping around inside my chest frantically. I watch as his eyes widen slightly. In the seconds that follow, I think of every awful thing he ever told me about the people that I can technically call my grandparents, aunt, and cousins. I think of him crying into my hair on Molly’s wedding night. I think of the nightmares that plagued me for months afterwards.

“Gus Kinney,” Dad says slowly. He stares at my pseudonym, then at me. “What is this?”

Where do I even start?

I think about how Dad must have felt growing up: unloved, unsafe, unsure. I think about how he’s always made sure to give me the exact opposite. I think about how he’s given me twenty-four years of feeling loved and secure and certain.

I think about how much I’d like to follow in his footsteps one day. Not in terms of my career or my sexuality, but with other things. I’d like to be the kind of husband he is. I’d like to be the kind of father he is. I’d like to have a family and a home like he has.

I think of all the things he’s meant to me and all the things I mean to him. _This will mean the world to him,_ Nanna said when she saw the book, _Just like you always have._ I think of all the years we spent apart and all the times we would reunite, and how he would always greet me with endless offerings of affection: smiles, kisses, hugs. I think of how ecstatic he was when I moved here and how much effort he’s driven into making me feel at home.

I think of how he’s been my hero since I can remember. He’s not the knight in shining armour that I used to believe him to be when I was little, but he’s incredible nonetheless.

I think of everything that makes him _him;_ everything that makes me _me;_ everything that makes us _us._

Dad and I look at each other and it feels like one of those times where we see each other with perfect clarity. He starts to smile, and as I offer a wholly confident explanation for my newly-minted pseudonym, the smile bursts into a heartfelt grin.

“It’s time to take the name back.” 

 **The End**  


End file.
